Writing the Life Within
Part One, Introduction to the Why
By Francine Brevetti
We humans carry around our experiences, memories of our culture, food and language, family and ethnic traditions, and the knowledge our brains have accrued during our lifetimes.
The interactions we have experienced from human to intellectual are recorded in our brains and consciousness.
So, when a person passes without having documented their life experience, all that juicy richness disappears. Forever. (Unless of course you are psychic and have the ability to tap into Uncle Gustavo’s essence for a postmortem chat.)
Do you want your story to fade into oblivion? Do you want your kids to wonder about your life before they were born or that of their ancestors? Do you want them to ponder questions just as you may have about your own ancestors? In other words, we sometimes think of our ancestors as having important clues to the question: How did I come to be who I am?
Why did Uncle Gustavo cry when they played La Marseillaise? How did it affect me when he did? And how has that memory made me think of myself or affected the way I communicate with my family?
Yes, leaving a legacy is the most common reason people give for this project.
What about the urgency of writing your life story? It doesn’t seem pressing, does it? You hear yourself say, “I can put this off.”
How often I’ve heard people say: “I wish I had asked my mother about her youth when she was still alive.” Or: “My dad used to tell these wonderful stories, but I never wrote them down.” Or: “I wish I could recall more of what happened when I was younger.”
It’s really simple to start writing the stories yourself and others will cherish. Start now, anywhere, just start. Carry a notebook with you everywhere, and reflect on the underlying reasons the stories you are shaping matter to you. Consider:
· Maybe writing helps you make sense of your life and see it clearly.
· Maybe as you grow older, you’re tired of looking at your life in the same old way. You want a new story for your life, a new form of acceptance.
· Or maybe you have to say the way you see things as you see them — since your family may have different interpretations of past events, different views of who you are.
· Or maybe you want to do research about the eras that you or your parents lived through. How DID the Vietnam War affect you or your family? How did the recession affect your prosperity or health or that of your family? You may just want to dig into the social or historical background of your family’s experiences.
What other reasons can you discover about why you want to write your life story.
Discovering your “why?” for writing clarifies and focuses your story. It helps you envision the audience you are writing for and what they long to hear from you.
Your “why” also makes it easier and faster to write the stories you and others will love.
Once you know your why. how do you proceed?
For many years I’ve loved helping people write their memoirs and autobiographies. Sometimes I’ve been a ghostwriter and other times I am the teacher/mentor/coach who helps them write their own book.
In either case, I can see their confusion as dig deeper and they grapple with their lives’ narratives. You can see it on their faces: “How do I do this? Where do I start and how do I shape my story?”
I suggest exploring these questions:
· What is the general subject matter? Is it your whole life story from the first memory to the present day, that is, an autobiography? Or is it a laser look at one period in your life — a memoir?
· Is it about you or someone in your family or your whole family.?
· Whom do you want to read it — your friends and family or the public at large?
· And how do you want to feel when it’s finished?
Next, put this document down now and write for two to 10 minutes responding to these questions.
See, you’ve already started.
Suggestion: repeat this process as often as you wish to flesh out your answers, until you are very clear about your writing direction.
Now we’re going to talk about the content of your story and how to accumulate material for it.
The first source of your material is in your memory. To help revive and sharpen your memories, here’s a simple yet potent exercise. (Another memory reviving exercise will be in the next lesson because your memory is so rich with facts, mental pictures, sights, smells, sounds, dialogue and other elements that could make your book wonderful.
This little exercise is a form of self-hypnosis. It’s not spooky, just a creative form of relaxation. Follow my instructions and then when I tell you, put down this document and write. You might even record it with pauses on your recording equipment. Then you can play it back while you do the written exercises.
Close your eyes and put yourself in a familiar past situation, a very early one, for instance, your first living room or the first day at kindergarten. You get the idea.
Go back to that place, eyes closed, and review all the sense memories you can: taste, touch, smell, auditory, the look of the room and its contents — color, texture, etc.
Who else was there? Was there conversation and can you recall it?
Give yourself a few minutes to do this and really feel yourself into that time and space again. Really experience all the sensory details again. Soak it all up.
Now here’s a big one: What was the emotional life like in that environment? Can you feel it?
When you are ready, write your recollections, describing all the sensations and interactions as they occurred to you.
Some of you may have had recollections that did not pertain to the subject of the exercise. That’s perfectly fine.
I had an elderly student once who, after doing this exercise, recalled an incident of 70 years before that she had never told anyone. As a small child in a remote Chinese village, she remembered her mother falling ill and hemorrhaging. There was no hospital nor medical help nearby. Her father and his friends carried mother away on a pallet to get help. Father came back much later without mother and no word was ever said about her absence. Mother never returned.
Isn’t that amazing that this simple exercise — (I had not suggested China at all) — brought her back 70 years in the past to a suppressed memory?
Whatever material came up for you may be appropriate for writing in your life story project. Or maybe it will just get you in the flow of writing, stoking the stream of consciousness.
Another tip: always have a notebook at hand, in the kitchen, by your bed, in the bathroom (my close friend Pat gets her best ideas while showering), in the car, your backpack. Your partner’s apartment even.
Here are some trenchant reflections from Linda Joy Myers, founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers:
Writing a memoir is a challenge on many levels. I asked us to review our life — who we are, what roles we played in our family and with our friends and asked us to expose ourselves deeply on the page. We must also confront certain psychological issues and emotional challenges:
· What is the truth?
· Will my family disown me if I write this?
· How do I get unstuck from some of my bad memories?
· Can I heal the past?
· Will anyone listen to my story?
· Can I write well enough to capture what I feel and know?
We’ll address these issues in future lessons.
More advice from a master:
‘Write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.”
Agatha Christie
